Learn about customers from v and Google blog search

By July of 2006, Technorati was tracking over 50 million blogs, and estimated that 175,000 new blogs are created each day. Granted, many (most?) of these blogs are completely irrelevant to everyone but their creator and two or three friends, but that still leaves hundreds of blogs written by professionals in any given industry for other professionals in that industry.  

 

Other blogs touch on issues related to your product and service every now and then. Blogs are great places to learn about your customers because, for some reason, people write blogs like online diaries little held back, little left to the imagination. When they rant about a vendor or a product they don’t like, they go all out. Also, bloggers love to link to and comment on one another’s blogs in a particular market space, so true conversations develop. Arguments, discussions, reviews, comparisons read influential bloggers’ posts and you’ll quickly feel the pulse of a market segment’s desires. How do you find the blogs and blog posts relevant to your business? Two sites are particularly helpful: Technorati and Google’s Blog Search. 

Technorati

Technorati is a search engine for blogs. Go to www.technorati.com and enter your keyword at the top. Technorati gives you three ways to search for blog posts:

- Search for posts with your keyword in the text: Choose In Blog Posts from the drop-down list to the left of the Search button. 

- Search for posts tagged with your keyword: Choose In Tags. 

- Search for your keyword in the description of the entire blog: Choose In Blog Directory. 

I find the Blog Directory search to be most helpful it returns a list of ofteninfluential blogs that deal with your market. If you’re selling home gym equipment, go visit them (by clicking their URL) and find out what they’re ranting about and what’s tickling their fancy. Pay attention to visitor comments, if any (few comments probably means few readers and not much influence), and follow the blogroll the list of blogs that this blog thinks is important.

The top listing for Home Gym Equipment is a post called Track Your Walks. Technorati shows us that 257 other blogs link to this one, making it highly authoritative. When you click the post title, you’re taken straight to that post. In this case, it’s the Walking expert for About.com at http://walking. about.com. Since a lot of people read and rely on About.com for advice, you’d want to read this blogger’s reviews of home exercise equipment before entering that market. 

You can sort the blogs by relevance (based on how closely the blog’s description matches your keyword) or by authority (a measure of how many other blogs link to that blog). Because the Blogosphere represents a network, you can usually find your way to the center of that network just by observing who’s quoting whom. Blogging expert Dave Taylor likens the Blogosphere to a giant party. The person in the middle of the room surrounded by gaping hangers-on is probably the most influential person. Sidle over to that group and you’ll learn a lot about your market. On the other hand, you can also find blogs that don’t link to other blogs, that just try to sell you stuff, that rant and rave but have no influence whatsoever. That’s like a person loudly talking at a party, but no one is listening. Technorati isn’t very smart about returning relevant search results in blog posts it will look at individual words rather than the meaning of the whole phrase. If your keyword is more than one word, put quotes around your search term to ensure that all the words appear together in the post.

Google blog search

http://blogsearch.google.com returns results not only from blogs, but also online forums. It works just like a regular Google search, without the Web pages, and sorted by relevance or date. Say you invented a device that improves automobile and truck gas mileage by adding supplemental hydrogen to the engine’s air intake valve. Enter your big keyword, hydrogen boost, into Google’s Blog Search. 

Clicking the first post leads us not to a blog, but to a forum dedicated to really big Toyota trucks and SUVs: www.ih8mud.com. The posts on the forum indicated that many doubted whether the hydrogen-boost kit would actually work as advertised, that the kit required too much power from the alternator, and that price tag of $900 seemed too steep. By reading over the posts, you can get a sense of the objections you’ll have to overcome in your sales process. Second, you see the specifications that you need to improve: Instead of 20–30 amps, can you design a unit that draws only 8–10? Third, you see that $900 is more than this segment of the market is willing to pay for a product like yours.

Loitering on Web sites

Your competitors’ Web sites are great places to learn what to do and what not to do. When I talked about bid persistence earlier in this article, I advised you to print out a list of the top AdWords advertisers in your market three times over six weeks. Grab those printouts now, and circle the Web sites that appear on all three pages both the sponsored and organic listings. It’s time to hang out with successful businesses and see what they’re up to. First, look at your competitor’s Web site as if you’re a potential customer. Can you find what you’re looking for? Does the site confuse or bore you? Is it easy to contact the site owner and ask questions? Do you trust the site? Can you order easily? 

Remember that the home page may not be the landing page you get to by clicking its ad. Check out its landing page, and see how it draws you in or not. Pay attention to how that landing page connects to the rest of the site. Does it try to make a sale, or capture your contact information? What are the featured products? What are their shipping and return policies?